I get what you mean by "behind closed doors", and agree - we simply don't know.
The only clue is of a recent comment by a minister when pressed about the Irish conversion and he responded with "there are no plans to do the same on UK roads". Ie he did not infer that they'd "look into it", or "monitor the sitation" etc. My reasons for mentioniong "would not get away with it" is more monetary than measurement. Ireland has very few roads, and very few signs. Although still costly the scale of conversion in Ireland would be miniscule compared to the UK. If a minister, or someone from the treasury, were to suggest that such and such billion pounds were going to be used to change the UK road signs for no apparent reason than to "be just like Europe" then their head would be on the block. I can imagine the newspapers now: "What Britain could have instead of metric signs: 100 nurses, 15 new hospitals, two pence off income tax, etc etc". I don't know the exact sums but I hope we agree that the press would have a field day. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David King Sent: 02 February 2005 12:00 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:32163] RE: Irish road metrication Stephen Humphreys wrote: > > 2) There are no plans to metricate roads (or more accurately, no > politician would get away with it!) > > There are no plans that have been made public to metricate the roads, what really goes on behind closed doors we do not know, and can only guess at. Thus, metrication of the roads in the UK is at present just guesswork. I believe that it will happen eventually, but I don't know if there are plans for it or not. David King
